Viewers of last night’s episode of ‘The Missing’ were torn between surprise at a brand new suspect being revealed, and shock at the supremely violent way he dealt with that nice police officer we’ve all grown to like.
German detective Jorn Lenhart had made the mistake of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, checking in with military press liaison officer Adam Gerrick about an old family friend Lena Garber, when a strange little girl appeared on the stairs, with a picture of “me, and mummy, in the basement”.
That was Jorn’s fate sealed, as Adam reached for the nearest implement to hand, which, unfortunately, happened to be a power drill.
The series’ writers, Jack and Harry Williams, explained this pretty barbaric method of doing away with poor Jorn at a press screening of the episode the previous night.
Jack said: “To be honest, he’s doing things in the house, he’s there, he’s got stuff knocking around.
“We needed him to use something that was in the house, and we wanted to do something that was specific and memorable. We talked about his character.
Jack added: “The difference between hitting somebody over the head and being in the moment and unintentional and actually using a drill is… this is very intentional and speaks to him as a character.
“There is a big lack of humanity to him as a character, it wasn’t just a tussle that went wrong. It says quite a lot about a person.”
His writing brother Harry also referred to the decision to expose at least this part of the story - Adam Gerrick’s culpability - as early as Episode 5 in the series of eight.
“Traditionally episode eight would be the time to finally home in on who it is, so with this season we thought if we could do that slightly earlier then we could play a different game narratively,” he says. “That can be a surprising thing, and there’s a whole other story to tell.”